presented collective petitions about social injustice. They expected action and often
received it; a wave of collective petitions contributed to the compilation of the 1649
Lawcode. Society felt a moral economy around the ruler’s obligation to protect it
from injustice. In 1636 a community righteously executed condemned criminals
(who had been a scourge on the town) when it felt that the tsar’s governor corruptly
would not do it. In even more extreme circumstances rulers themselves honored the
community’s demands to punish evil-doers, even unto death. During rampaging
urban uprisings in Moscow, on two occasions rulers—in 1648 Tsar Aleksei
Mikhailovich and in 1682, regents acting for the boy tsars Ioann and Peter
Alekseevichi—sacrificed corrupt boyars to certain death by mob violence, knowing
that the only way to stop the riots was to satisfy the moral economy of the crowd. In
so doing, they acted out the ruler’s liminal capability of“sacred violence,”shedding
blood to fulfill their obligation to protect the people from injustice, however high
the cost.
Most of the time, however, Muscovite rulers fulfilled their obligation to provide
justice more routinely. The empire-wide bureaucracy doubled as a judicial network
(as discussed in Chapter 7); governors and scribes professionally trained in the
law adjudicated cases of felony and high crime according to rudimentary legal
handbooks of procedure and punishment (issued 1497, 1550, 1649, 1669) and
individual decrees. Justice was not arbitrary. Like all sovereign states, Muscovy
levied the death penalty for the worst crimes—murder, heresy, treason—and
assigned lesser penalties (corporal punishment,fines) for lesser felonies and misde-
meanors. Judges regularly tempered the written law by invoking“the tsar’s mercy”
to reduce sentences.
The empire-wide judicial system offered all subjects, regardless of confession or
community, recourse in cases of highest crime, land disputes, service remuneration,
and other major issues. Non-Russians participated in the criminal justice system as
plaintiffs and defendants, witnesses and guarantors. Perhaps most interesting was
the defense of personal honor. Individuals of all social ranks and ethnicities, from
slaves to boyars, from Ukrainians to Tatars to Iakuts, could receive monetary
compensation (on a graduated scale according to social rank) for verbal injury.
The practice, echoing similar protections of personal honor in medieval and early
Europe, helped to preserve stability in face-to-face communities, while garnering
the ruler credit for protecting his people from injury. When European noblemen
brought dueling to Muscovy in the late seventeenth century, it was immediately
banned and the quarreling parties were sent to the tsar’s courts to sue for dishonor.
European style dueling became fashionable in Russia only at the turn of the
nineteenth century.
Thus, Muscovy’s imperial imaginary envisioned a world in which the ruler
claimed wide authority, but was moderated in that authority by his Christian
obligation to heed advice, protect his people from injustice, defend faith and
realm, and lead his people to salvation. His power was limited by religion, by
tradition, by the moral economy of his people. Ultimately, legitimacy was ensured
by the ruler fulfilling these expectations. But the ideas themselves had to be
disseminated if they were to bind the community together. In a setting of limited
Broadcasting Legitimacy 139